A quite stately and elegant
apartment building, the Turin at 333 Central Park West is one
of the very few residential buildings with deep courtyards, designed
to provide more "light and air," that works well as
a composition.

View from the
east

The architect, Albert Joseph
Bodker, has taken considerable liberties with the ever popular
Italian Renaissance-palazzo style design and they are very successful.
Above the traditional two-story, rusticated limestone base with
arched windows on the first floor, the building has a very pronounced
beltcourse that is repeated again above the 10th floor of the
12-story structure. A small belt or string course is above arched
windows on the ninth floor that are twinned beneath larger arched
decorative elements in terracotta. The arched terracotta ornamentation
is repeated on the top floor where there is more ornamentation
beneath the large cornice.

Central Park
West entrance

The building's fine beige-brick
facade above the limestone base is enlivened by handsome terracotta
spandrels decorated with the heads of a man and a woman.

The second floor windows have
very handsome short wrought-iron balconies with gentle curves
that are supported, in part, by scroll limestone brackets.

One of the enclosed
courtyards that is a bit sunken

The archted entranced, which
as a very large, half-dome, glass marquee, is deeply recessed
in one of the building's courtyards and no longer has a very long
canopy that stetched to the curb. The step-up lobby is very impressive.

The buidling, which has protruding
air-conditioners, has built by the Sturtyvant Ralty Comopany in
1909 and has 72 apartments. It has no garage.

"Strong lines and good
proportion," wrote Andrew Alpern in his book, "New York's
Fabulous Luxury Apartments withOriginal Floor Plansfrom the Dakota,
River House,OlympicTower and Other Great Buildings," (Dover
Publications, Inc. 1987), "distinguish 333 from its neweer
neibhros. Its four tower-like sections contain six large apartments
bper floor, all of the long hall variety. In each case the entrance
to the suite is at one end of a narrow corridor leading tot he
living and dining rooms. The only advantage to be gained from
this rather dismal arrangement is that the sleeping rooms are
well removed rom the entertaining spaces, which in most of the
apartments included an additional windowed reception room. The
building originally boasted open cage-work elevator shafts with
elaborately grilled cabs, but these, alas, have long since been
replaced."